Upgrading CUPD 1.1 to 1.2 -> printing using usb:/dev/usb/lpX fails

Jan-Marek Glogowski glogow at fbihome.de
Mon Aug 25 05:59:10 PDT 2008


My company is going to switch from Debian Sarge to Etch, which updates  CUPS from 1.1.23 to 1.2.7. As a result the local printers stop working.

I'm using usb:/dev/usb/lp0 as the printer URI. The device exists, but CUPS web frontend claims no printer is connected.

If I change the URI to the one supplied by /usr/lib/cups/backend/usb (e.g. usb://EPSON/Stylus%20C66), printing works again.

Now I have the problem, that I need to manage a few hundred local printers. These are centrally configured using GOsa, where the admin supplies the PPD, changes the defaults as wanted and adds the general URI for parallel port or USB. So far this got the printers working.

Is there a way to switch CUPS back to the old URI style?
Is there a way to get a mapping from the old URIs to the new one?

As long as there is just one printer connected, running the configured backend to get the new URI would work, but some users have the request to use multiple printers, where it gets hard to match the PPD to the right URI.

BTW - the HP backend adds the printers serial to the URI to support multiple printers of the same type on one workstation. A lot of USB printers seem to provide a valid iSerial (i.e. != 0). Is this supported in the usb backend too?

Thanks

Jan-Marek Glogowski





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